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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25761319">Shades of Irregularities</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinnieTherPooh/pseuds/WinnieTherPooh'>WinnieTherPooh</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Depression, Emotional Hurt, F/M, FitzSimmons - Freeform, Mentions of Cancer, mild spoilers? this is a tangent based off of 7x11, s7 finale speculation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 05:15:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,510</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25761319</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinnieTherPooh/pseuds/WinnieTherPooh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Color System (copyright 2014 L. Fitz and A. Mackenzie) had helped ever since Mack first invented it in the garage. It had first come about during the early days, when it was just a way to differentiate between Good and Bad days. Now, it's the only way he knows how to cope with the cosmos. (Season 7 finale speculation)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Shades of Irregularities</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hi there, and thanks for stopping in. Please know that this fic is dark, angsty, and delves heavily into depression, illness, and vague mentions of death. It also has some tangential references to Frozen and Harry Potter because what can I say, I have a brand. Stay safe and healthy!</p>
<p>xoxo<br/>Win</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Color System (copyright 2014 L. Fitz and A. Mackenzie) had helped ever since Mack first invented it in the garage. It had first come about during the early days- the dark ones where he couldn’t do much more than sit in a wheelchair, watching the new mechanic fiddle around with machines and hopelessly flipping a tool back and forth in his newly weakened hands. Some days, he would shuffle around the lab, practicing the names of tools, engraving numbers to remember the names, avoiding Jemma’s watchful eye. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mack would smile and say, “It’s a Green day, huh Fitz?” And all of a sudden, his good days had a name. Good days were Green, like the grass at the academy, the garden at the cottage he had shared with his mother and Gran, and like the bowtie on the stuffed monkey Jemma had given him for Christmas the year before. G for Green for Good. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Yellow days were Bad days. Yellow was pus, and harsh sunlight against his eyes, and on yellow days he stayed in the corner, avoiding his inability to speak clearly by refusing to speak at all. Mack would give him a sympathetic nod, the clap on the back of a fellow soldier who knew what it was like to fight for freedom in his own head, and move on in the lab. He would still talk to Fitz, not expecting a response on Yellow days, and that helped too. Mack gave him a pocket calendar and a box of crayons, suggested casually that he could mark the days off until the next game in their favorite series came out. It was only natural that he started to fill in each day with its own color.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Over time, he developed a system that even Mack couldn’t understand the depths of. Orange days were neither Good nor Bad. On Orange days, they would sit and play video games, together at first, and then later, once his coordination improved, against each other. Grey days were turbulent, strings of data crashing around in his head like bad programming, making him wonder what was real and what was not real. On Blue days, he couldn’t get out of bed at all. The whole week after Jemma left, every box on the calendar was scribbled in shades of Blue, that slowly bled into Grey. He bought another pocket calendar, and then another, until filling in the box was a colorful meditation, a reflection on his progress and a path towards the future.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Then came the Framework, and all of a sudden he had to change the name for his Good days. Green became nightmares and Ophelia and the twisted hatred inside of him. In the end, it didn’t matter what color he chose because Good days just didn’t happen anymore.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Purple was his heart unfolding again, with Pink creeping at the edges to become a new type of happiness. Pink was his mother’s jumper in the picture Jemma saved from the Playground, and the color of galaxies that reminded him of how magnificent his wife was, and the color of the sunrises that they watched while they solved time. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>It had been a Pink day until he collapsed in the tent. He had woken up with Enoch and Jemma hovering over him, and blood tests, and a few hours of lying helplessly on a cot. Those were automatic factors to make a day Yellow in his calendar that had long since disappeared. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The day the bloodwork came back was a day of crashing, resounding Blue. Blue was the reflection of the deepest light at the bottom of the ocean, the wavy patterns across Jemma’s face, and the depths of the water that had almost killed them, and it came back with a vengeance on the day when Jemma’s tests showed them that his own body was full of cells trying to kill him. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The days were Blue for a long time after that, but a different type of a Blue. A Blue where he stuffed down his existential dread and pretended that they would find a solution, and focused his energy on being Pink for Jemma because she needed it. Blue was the impending dread of losing Jemma, of staying behind while she saved the world. It was the primal fear of a child, afraid of being left alone again to suffer through a condition he couldn’t control. Blue was everyday, buried beneath a beard, and the pretenses of Pink, and a shiny optimism that felt like a mask. Jemma needed to save the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It had been Blue days ever since she left, sailing off on the tides of time. He bought another calendar, scribbling in the days with Blue when he had enough strength. All his energy was going to her now, navigating her through dark waters that neither of them could fully understand. And then there was Luna- his reason to keep burying his Blue to keep her days Pink. It was only after he had tucked her into bed, safe under sheets with the patterns of the stars, that he allowed himself to crumble at the table. The Blue got deeper the day that she found him passed out in the bathroom, covered in his own vomit. Her screaming shook him out of the chemo-induced haze that had felled him in the first place, and after he had showered they both fell back asleep, Blue tears drying on their cheeks.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>He fought hard for her to go back to Pink after that, but now she was scared too. </p>
<p>“Daddy’s just a little sick, Luna-bear. I’ll be okay.” He patted the bathroom floor next to him, two weeks later when all of a sudden his legs forgot how to hold him up. “Come sit with me.”</p>
<p>“I don’t want you to be sick.” Luna’s lip was trembling. “I want you to be okay. I want Mummy to come and make it better.”</p>
<p>“I want your Mummy to come back too, but we have to be patient. Patient and brave, like Mummy.” Fitz smiled reassuringly. “Bring me a story, and we can read right here tonight.”</p>
<p>Luna returned with a book and a question. “If Mummy came back, would she make you all better?” </p>
<p>Fitz looked up at the ceiling, and it was the darkest Blue he had ever seen. Luna tugged at his sleeve, and her hand pulled him back to a world that needed to be Pink for her. “You know, Luna-bear, I think she would.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>That night, after he had carried her to bed and spent the next ten minutes gasping for breath in the kitchen, he dialed his mother’s number. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>It took time to adjust to their new normal. Gran kept the world Pink for Luna, and with her help Fitz kept pushing back at the Blue in his own world. The Zephyr was becoming harder and harder to help, and he kept imagining it as a ship in a turbulent sea, slipping further and further below Blue waves he couldn’t control. That’s how he would explain it to Luna, he decided, if the time came to explain why Mummy wasn’t coming back. “It’s like Frozen,” he would say, “When the ship goes down at sea.” She would push for more, and he would say, “Remember that water has memory, and so do we. I can tell you what I remember, and we talk about her and she’ll never really go away.”</p>
<p>But, of course, the waves that took her down would still be there in his mind, and the water in his memory was so goddamn Blue.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>His mother had started helping out into a chair in the garden each day, where he could watch Luna play and still use his tablet to trace the last traces of the Zephyr through time without using up too much of the precious energy he had remaining. Blue barely warranted a name anymore- it was just the cold and watery truth of reality. When Z1 disappeared completely, it was almost a relief that she wouldn’t come back to see how dark Blue he had become.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It was a Blue day when he lay, half asleep, in the reclining chair. The calorie-dense smoothie his mum had made him was forgotten in the cupholder, a last ditch attempt by her to restore the strength that his treatment kept stripping away. Luna’s games were the main functions of the tablet nowadays, and Luna lay beside him, explaining the rules of being a dragon when the tone of her voice changed into panic.</p>
<p>“Daddy, wake up. There’s somebody strange in the garden.” </p>
<p>Years of instinct were hard to overcome. Fitz started awake, cradling Luna in his arms, hoping that if Death greeted him like a friend, it would at least spare her. Her head was buried into his shoulder as he looked up, prepared to do whatever it took to give her a future of Pinks. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Blue burst into Purple blossomed into Pink.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em> “Hey, Luna-bear. Look up for me. That’s your mum.” </em>
</p>
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